Page 4

Chapter 4

Frost

Ember insisted we stop for lunch, which was good, because frankly, sitting in the tiny back seat of Caspian’s car was going to kill me by the time we got to Sunrunner lands. I stopped and stretched when we got out, bending down to touch my toes, to stretch the cramped muscles of my legs.

It was annoying, being tall.

Everyone was always jealous because I could reach high shelves—which was admittedly sometimes useful—and because society seemed to think that being tall was attractive. But that was silly. Most movie stars were under six feet, both male and female. Attractive people were rarely tall, let alone as ridiculously tall as me.

I often had to duck in doorways and going down staircases, and if I wasn’t paying attention, I was liable to smack my head on things. Off the rack clothing rarely fit, so if I hadn’t been born into money, I’d have been constantly dressed in pants that barely brushed my ankles. I could almost never ride the rides at carnivals, because there wasn’t just a lower height limit, but an upper one as well.

It was inconvenient, and yet people were envious of it. It didn’t make any sense at all.

“You doing okay?” Ember asked, coming up next to me and squeezing my shoulder. “It’s a bit of a drive, gotta admit. I wasn’t looking forward to getting back on the road, even though we had to get going.”

Kit sighed. “Taking a plane would have been more sensible.”

“But then my car would have been stuck in Dawnchaser lands. How would we get around when we get to Verisa, without a car?”

Kit had first suggested flying yesterday, going so far as to look up the cost of flights, but the sad look on Caspian’s face at the thought of leaving his car behind had been enough to convince me driving was necessary. Kit had agreed as well, so he must have had a similar thought process.

It was only a day’s drive, and if Caspian was willing to take that extra time getting back, then I was willing too.

Kit, for reasons I didn’t understand, was being huffy with Caspian. I didn’t think it was that he didn’t like him—Kit was much meaner than that to people he disliked. But there was something going on there, some reason he was being strange.

The restaurant we ended up stopping at was one of those family places you found on every other highway exit, this one the kind with the big gift shop full of weird clothes and glittery tchotchkes and home decor based on the local area. Since we were still in Dawnchaser lands, it was flowers as far as the eye could see. Back home, similar shops were always filled with snow globes and cute signs about loving “lakeside life” and that sort of thing. Also, little replicas of Moonstriker Tower abounded, and that was always . . . well, it was weird when people thought the place you lived was a symbol of anything. The tower was pretty, sure, but it wasn’t some great bastion of reason like people seemed to think.

No one was always rational.

As we headed to the host stand, Ember grabbed a wooden sign and held it up. It was a riot of bright colors and read “Choose the Flower Life.”

She looked at me, amusement writ large over her face. “Should I buy it for Mother?”

I blinked at her in shock at the very notion, but Kit snorted, shaking his head and shoving the thing down, back toward the spot where Ember had grabbed it from. “Very funny.”

Ahh, a joke. I should have known. Ember was always joking, and we hadn’t been apart so long I could have forgotten.

“No, we should not buy that for Mother,” I answered.

She sighed, rolling her eyes. “Gah, you two are such buzzkills.”

I picked up the one that had been sitting behind the sign she’d chosen. “This one would make her angrier.”

It was covered with pale pink cherry blossoms, and in a near-unreadable cursive font covered with iridescent glitter, read “There is wisdom in flowers.”

“Oh my god,” she breathed, snatching it from my hands and staring at it in wonder. “She’d die.” She turned to look at Kit, as though begging him to buy it for her, but Caspian was the one who spoke up.

“Sorry, but we don’t really have room in the car for it.”

“We can mail it to your recipient,” the friendly yellow-haired woman at the host stand piped up. “We can even gift wrap it for you.”

Ember literally squealed, hugging the sign to her chest. “We have to. Totally not negotiable.”

“There’s no point in having it gift wrapped,” I pointed out. “Tower security goes through all packages before delivering them. If you want to send it to Mother, you might as well just send it to her as it is. But of course, then you’ll have to explain what you were doing here.”

She scoffed and waved me off, turning to the young woman. “I want to send it to Moonstriker Tower, please. It’s, um . . .” She turned back to me. “What’s the address, Frosty?”

I blinked at her. “You . . . you’ve lived in the tower more than twenty years, and you don’t know the address?”

She shrugged, entirely unapologetic, and waited.

Kit was the one who huffed a sigh and offered up the address, while the employee stared on in shock. “Moonstriker Towe—Oh my gods, you’re the Moonstriker siblings. Could . . . could I have an autograph?”

Ember smiled sweetly and agreed, Kit mumbling something about not being a damned Moonstriker, and I . . . was this real? Autographs? Just for being Mother’s children? It wasn’t as though any of us had done much worth being impressed by. We weren’t movie stars or models or?—

“I know, weird, huh? I get it sometimes when I go places back home. And anytime I leave Sunrunner lands, and someone recognizes these”—he flipped up his mirrored sunglasses and pointed at his reddish-purple eyes—“bam, mobbed. It’s like my dad is a star, and I get treated the same just for existing.”

And that . . . well, it was still silly, but it made a little sense, put like that. I’d faced adulation for merely existing when I’d gone to college, but I had assumed that had been about my family’s intellectual accomplishments, and frankly, it had faded very quickly when people had realized I wasn’t all that interesting.

We simply weren’t going to be here long enough for people to realize that I might look pretty, and yes I was a Moonstriker, but on the inside, I was about as shiny as one of those ancient coins they unearthed when digging up long abandoned cities in dead civilizations.

There, a metaphor.

Rain would have been proud.

I just smiled at the young woman, ducked my head, and offered my card to pay for the sign Ember wanted to send to Mother. “What we’re actually here for is food, though,” I said as she rang the thing up.

She beamed up at me. “Oh certainly. I’ll get you seated, and then I can see about sending this off to . . . to your mother.”

For a second, I was genuinely concerned she was going to swoon at the thought of sending a gift to Mother. A gift intended to make her downright angry. I doubted the creator of the sign would find it amusing, the idea that we were mocking their work by sending it to someone who would hate it.

Still, she seated us immediately, and the menu had things I was comfortable ordering, so I couldn’t complain. Mother was going to know I’d had something to do with the sign, and I’d get an earful over it, but it didn’t matter. It had made Ember laugh, and even made Kit smile.

“I take it your mom isn’t a big proponent of the wisdom of, uh, flowers?” Caspian asked, looking mildly confused by the concept.

I was glad, because I didn’t know about any particular wisdom flowers held. Perhaps it was one of those metaphors about simple things being best. Or . . . finding beauty where you were instead of searching for it?

Hells, I didn’t know. There were too many common sayings for me to keep them all straight, and so many of them were based on colloquialisms that may or may not have any connection to modern reality. I tried to track them sometimes—I’d even kept a notebook in my teens—but there was just so much to learn, I quickly got lost. The notebook had been full in two weeks, and I’d quickly given up when I realized I would need a veritable library of them to keep up.

How did so many people intuit what others were trying to say? Language was so much more complex than math.

“Mother is not fond of . . . kitsch,” I offered, hoping that would be enough to explain my gut feeling that Mother would despise the sign with every part of her being.

“Delta Moonstriker is fond of two things,” Kit announced, ignoring that the server had come to drop a plate of pancakes in front of him. “Math and power. If you aren’t serving the purpose of either of those things, then she’s not interested in you.”

The server paused a moment but didn’t say a word, just then continued down the table to give Ember a plate of . . . well, I didn’t know what it was, other than a gooey white mass that smelled of sausage. I blinked at it, and she curled a protective arm around her plate. “You stay away from my biscuits and gravy, Frosty. Don’t make me stab you with my fork.”

I blinked up at her. “Biscuits and . . . It looks terrible.”

“But it’s actually amazing,” Caspian broke in as the server set a plate of the same in front of him. He grabbed his fork and cut into it, spearing a piece of—biscuit?—and holding it out toward me. “Seriously. You gotta try it.”

Tentatively, I leaned forward and took his fork into my mouth, letting the—yes, it was in fact a biscuit, but . . . oh my.

That was utterly delicious.

Sausage and white gravy and fluffy biscuit and somehow, despite looking bizarre and unappetizing, it worked together. I groaned aloud, turning to Kit. For some reason, he was glaring at Caspian, but I grabbed his shoulder. “Were you aware of this? It’s . . .”

He sighed and gave me a long-suffering smile. “Yeah. I’ve had it. Hard to go around eating that and stay in shape, but well . . .” He trailed off, looking down at his pancakes, and shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve got to give in and have the unhealthy food.”

The server offered him a tiny bottle that said “pure maple syrup” on the side, a smile on his face, before giving me my perfectly average ham and cheese omelet, and suddenly, I felt cheated. Not by the restaurant, but maybe . . . maybe by life.

I usually ordered one of the same half dozen things in every restaurant because they were comfortable. They were usually made similarly no matter where I was, so they were safe for me to order without being overwhelmed by the new or different.

I’d always liked being safe. Steady.

It was easy. Doing anything when I didn’t know what the outcome would be was . . . it was terrifying. How did they all do it? Pancakes and biscuits and gravy and driving across the world because it was in danger and just . . . everything.

Next to me, Kit sighed, wrapping an arm around mine. “One step, remember?”

It was always what he’d said when we were children and I’d been paralyzed by the sheer number of choices set before me. It was a reminder that I just had to take one step to get started, and the rest could come to me as I went.

It didn’t change the fact that I was overwhelmed by processing the possibilities and trying to decide how to get the best outcome, but it was a good reminder that the first step wasn’t the last, and I could still change course if I needed to.

Kit looked up at the server. “Hey, obviously we’ll pay for both meals, but could you get my brother the biscuits and gravy, too? Clearly, he needs that.”

“Of course,” the guy agreed immediately, zipping off toward the kitchen.

It only took a few minutes, probably because the restaurant was mostly empty on a weekday morning, but he came back out with a similar plate to the ones he’d given Ember and Caspian, and set it before me. “You’re a big guy,” he said. “You can probably eat both anyway.”

Kit grinned at him. “If he can’t, I can. I might not be a big guy, but I’m a big asshole.”

Everyone at the table laughed, and it was incredible. It was just the kind of joke he might have made when we were kids, but instead of Mother getting offended and yelling at him about how he’d ruined lunch for the whole family, everyone laughed. It was . . . it was fun.

Eating lunch was fun.

How absolutely bizarre.

He did end up eating half my omelet too, and it was just like old times, only so much better.

We paid and headed for the car, and as we reached the parking lot, I hesitated. My legs ached just looking at the darn thing. Another three—or more—hours, cooped up in?—

“Frost should sit up front,” Ember said. “I know we don’t need a navigator, but if we end up lost, he’s totally the one most likely to figure things out.”

Kit turned a glare on her, as though sitting in the back seat was a personal insult.

She scowled right back, stepping in close to him and lowering her voice. “It’s cramped back there, jackass. His legs hurt.”

Kit reeled back, turning to look at me, his eyes wide. When I ducked my head, not wanting to admit it, he slumped slightly. “You can tell me things like that, you know.”

I shrugged. “I assumed there was a reason you wanted to sit up front.”

“Nothing valid,” Ember interjected, as though she already knew why. Maybe she did. People were always guessing what others were thinking, especially my clever siblings. That was why it was so frustrating that they were eternally a mystery to me. Ember came up and poked me in the side. “So into the front you go, bro.”

The front seat was . . . well, it was actually quite comfortable. I smiled across the center console at Caspian as he slid into the driver’s seat. “Not that I think you’ll need help finding our way but let me know if you need anything.”

He grinned right back, looking very much like the movie star he’d said he wasn’t. “If you wanna find me a gas station nearby where we can grab some sodas on the way back to the highway, I’m not gonna complain.”

And so . . . I did.

It was good to be thought of by my companions, and even better to be useful.